Then, on September 6th, Yushchenko began suffering from extreme stomach and back pains. By September 9th, he had, bafflingly, disappeared from the campaign trail. Even some in the press who had bemoaned what seemed to be a lack of toughness in the candidate were shocked. Only a month and a haJJ re- mained until the first election round. How sick was he? A few days later, it emerged that Yushchenko was in a clinic in Vienna, seriously ill with what Dr. Ni- kolai Korpan, his chief physician, de- scribed as an array of afflictions. Yu- shchenko's campaign manager identi- fied them as, among other things, pan- creatitis, gastritis, facial paralysis, and proctocolitis. Korpan announced that an unidentifiable "special atypical agent" could have set off the maladies. The Yu- shchenko camp claimed that he had been poisoned, and it is a curious fact that, the night before he became ill, Yushchenko had dined with Ihor Smeshko, the head of Ukraine's Security Service, and his deputy, Volodymyr Satsyuk, to discuss security issues related to the campaign. On September 18th, Yushchenko led a large campaign rally in Kiev. His ap- pearance was startling-his face, which had been unlined, was palsied, a swollen mass of craters and lesions. In a thick, dis- torted voice, he told the crowd, "I want to say to the government, 'You won't poison us.' " Three days later, he stood up in par- liament to deliver a dramatic, unscripted speech. After reciting a list of prominent Ukrainians who had died suspiciously in the previous few years, he said, "Don't ask who is next. Each one of you will be next. When you ask why I avoided the same fate, the answer is it was the wrong dose at the wrong time and my angels were awake. . . . You know very well who the killer is-the government." The allegations of poisoning were treated dismissively by Yushchenko's peers in the government. Some attrib- uted his illness to alcoholism, others to bad sushi-never mind that neither one would fully explain his symptoms. B y the time the polls closed on Elec- tion Da the first accounts of whole- sale fraud had emerged. Senator Richard Lugar, who was in Ukraine as President Bush's special envoy; told reporters, "It is now apparent that a concerted and force- fill program of Election Day fraud and abuse was enacted with either the lead- ership or coöperation of governmental authorities." Pora activists started build- ing the tent city at eight o'clock that night. It was obvious that they had planned for this moment. For example, they refused to allow people who were drinking to enter areas where they might provoke the police. Footage of the protests was being broadcast around the world-but not across Ukraine. UT-1, the state network, and the main private channels, instead reported that Yanukovych had won by I almost a million votes and had been con- gratulated by Putin. In cities like Kiev, there were other ways of getting infor- mation-kiosks carrying foreign news- papers, a range of broadcasters, blogs, and, of course, the protesters themselves. But in the eastern Donbas the officially I controlled media are dominant. Chan- nel 5, for example, was taken off the air as soon as the protest burgeoned in Kiev. In many parts of the country; Internet access is extremely limited. As far as any- one watching only the local news knew, there were no protests to speak of I On November 24th, staff members of various magazines published by the Post's parent company gathered around the newsroom's television as the Central Elec- tion Commission declared Yanukovych the official winner. The editor of the women's magazine Pink, a woman in her mid-twenties, who was educated in the United States and had lived in France, began to weep. But there were indications that the government had lost control. The sign- language interpreter who was supposed to be repeating the victory announcement on UT-1 instead signed, "The results are rigged. . . . Do not believe them." The news staffs at the major networks went on strike; for a while, some channels were left broadcasting loops of cartoons and travel shows. Then the stations began to give in. On November 25th, Alexander Rodnyan- skJr, the co-chairman of 1 + 1, went on the air and read a statement saying that he and his staff would begin to tell the truth about the election. Soon afterward, the journalists on UT-1 were also able to re- port the news from Kie "We decided to make a move, which is not to be considered a heroic move," Rod- nyansky told me. "We were very much in the power of the pro-government pomt THE LITERARY EVENT OF 2004 A brilliant new telling of the world's oldest epic. First inscribed on stone tablets a's early as 1700" BC Gilgamesh was lost until its dis ove,ry armost two millellhia later. In: giving voice to grief and,the fear of death- nd j,n portraying Jove and vulneréjbility , the story has become, a persònal testimony for mi lIions of readers in dozens oflanguáges. . '..:' "'>.; . '.. -' : "'" STEPH EN MITCHELL - . " , -- ',' <, ,-: "', , , . . . . . . r""" , " ') . ".-'- ," ,:, ''''' ' '''''' , , ';.. '. ... . - -. .; :- ". ." . ,:-' "." . .. . , , . -'..." . . . ';' ....u. . ',':,; '",' ""':""" " " " . ,í... , , . .< x ' '" ' < \ , " . ,:< " ;,,:'., '\ \ -W r ' < \ . ,', , " , " . . Jr\ . = .' , .:' --.. '- ' .... \' ',' ,: , ' . , , ' 'I... Newsweek calls Mitchell's unforgettable new interpretation "ONE OF HUMANITY'S MOST SATISFYING NARRATIVES... beautifully retold and a page turner in the bargain. Like Seamus Heaney's recent retelling of Beowulf, this book proves that in the right hands, '. no great story ever grows stale." Harold Bloom, author of The Western Canon, finds MitcheU's new work equally praiseworthy: II A wonderful version, , ..It is a$ ELOQUENT AND NUANCED jì p . Sch. to, A VIACO.M Co.APAMY www.simonsays.com THE NEW YOR.KER, DECEMBER. 13, 2004 47